From the Arkansas Advocate:
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin asked Congress on Tuesday to ban so-called abortion shield laws in states where the procedure remains legal.
In a letter co-signed by 15 other state attorneys general, Griffin said, “These laws are blatant attempts to interfere with states’ ability to enforce criminal laws within their borders and disrupt our constitutional structure.”
States where abortion remains legal have passed laws protecting abortion providers from legal consequences if they perform abortions for residents of states where abortion is banned or supply residents in those states with medications that induce abortion. Such shield laws arose after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and many states, like Arkansas, passed new bans or allowed previous bans that had been dormant to go into effect.
Some of these shield laws explicitly protect abortion providers who prescribed and shipped abortion pills to women in states with bans, frustrating attempts by anti-abortion officials to prosecute the providers.
Louisiana criminally charged Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New York earlier this year for prescribing and mailing abortion pills — the first time a provider has been charged with providing abortion medication over state lines. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, however, refused to arrest or extradite Carpenter.
At a morning press conference in Little Rock, Griffin compared shield laws to sanctuary laws for those living in the U.S. illegally, saying they protect those who flout Arkansas’ outright abortion ban from being extradited to face criminal charges or to impose liability.
“You’re going to allow people to operate in your border in a way that violates our law, that specifically and openly flouts our law, but you’re going to protect them from the consequences of that,” Griffin said at the press conference on Tuesday.
Griffin said he believes what he is asking lawmakers to do is different from a federal abortion ban that the closely-divided Congress has seemed hesitant to tackle.
“This has more to do with a constitutional structure and states enforcing their own law. This is not about me enforcing New York’s law or vice versa,” Griffin said. “It’s about one state interfering … with the enforcement of another state’s law.”
But Griffin acknowledged that asking for action and Congressional movement on the matter were two different matters. Abortion proved to be a weak issue for the GOP in the years since Roe was overturned, as public opinion continues to favor the procedure remaining legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center. Persistent victories in favor of abortion access at the ballot box preceded some Republicans backing off from hardline rhetoric, while President Donald Trump said he would veto a federal ban on the 2024 campaign trail.
Griffin also announced Tuesday that he was sending cease-and-desist letters to two entities shipping abortion pills within the United States and to two website companies that provide website services to LifeOnEasyPills.org, a site Griffin said his office believed was based in India that ships abortion medication.
In the letters, he said website language that said abortion pills are safe “may constitute” deceptive advertising under state law, citing studies that argue that mifepristone, a drug used in medication-induced abortions, is unsafe.
If the entities don’t cease advertising abortion pills in Arkansas, Griffin said his office may bring a lawsuit against them for violating the state’s deceptive trade practices law.
Mifepristone was first approved by the FDA in 2000, and medical professionals widely consider its use in abortions safe.
Griffin would not say whether any of the websites he targeted with the cease-and-desist letters had actually mailed pills to Arkansas.
“I think I could say definitively … that these particular cease-and-desist orders relate to the messaging of the advertising,” Griffin said. “We have some other inquiries, investigations that are ongoing that aren’t related to this.”
